Lydia Rodarte-Quayle
|Last Appearance = }} Lydia Rodarte-Quayle (pronunciation of last name: /roʊdɑrt kweɪl/) is the Head of Logistics at Madrigal Electromotive GmbH. An executive at Madrigal, Lydia was based in the American southwest through the Madrigal office in Houston, Texas. She supplied methylamine to Gustavo Fring prior to the collapse of Gus' Drug Empire. She is also a single mother, raising a young daughter Kiira Rodarte-Quayle. Biography Early career At some point in her career, Lydia joined the German manufacturing and shipping conglomerate Madrigal Electromotive, working out of Madrigal's office in Houston, Texas. She became an executive in the company and was awarded the Platinum Award in recognition of "Outstanding Leadership in Business." Season 5 After attending a meeting between Madrigal's board of directors and the DEA, Lydia met with Mike Ehrmantraut, at a diner. She hands him a list of eleven men who were on Gus's payroll and suggests Mike kill them before they can implicate either of them. Mike shoots down the idea, vouching for his men and leaving Lydia helpless and panic-stricken. Unbeknownst to Mike, Lydia had hedged her bets beforehand by making the same pitch to another man, Chris Mara. Chris admits that Lydia was going to pay him $30,000 to kill Mike and $10,000 for each man on the list, starting with Duane Chow, who Mike finds already dead on the couch. Mike shoots Chris dead with a sigh. Later, Mike travels to Houston, sneaks into Lydia's house (also occupied by her daughter Kiira and hired nanny) and pulls her into a bedroom at gunpoint. Mike prepared to kill her for mandating the deaths of Chris and Chow. Lydia begs him to leave her body in the house so that her daughter won't think she was abandoned. On the verge of shooting her, something stops him. He hesitates and asks if she can still get her hands on methylamine. "Maybe," she says. "Why?" 5x02_-_Lydia.png|Lydia giving the 11 names to Mike at the diner . Lydia_House.png|Mike threatening to kill Lydia . to the DEA .]] After she provides Walt, Mike, and Jesse with their first shipment of methylamine for free, Lydia receives a call from Mike at the Madrigal office in Houston. Mike warns that the police are about to arrive. A few seconds later, DEA agents Hank Schrader and Steven Gomez enter with officers in tow. Lydia escorts them to the Madrigal warehouse and points out Ron Forenall, the foreman and warehouse supervisor and the suspect who Hank and Gomez appear to be after. Ron stares daggers at her as the officers arrest him: she's thrown one of her own to the wolves . Back in her office Lydia calls Mike, hysterical about Ron's arrest. He reassures her that Ron won't talk, but she says she cannot continue to supply methylamine without someone in the warehouse. "I'll send a new guy," Mike says simply. On a later evening, at the Houston warehouse, Lydia is standing beside an electrical control panel. After a few tries, she successfully shuts down the surveillance system. She opens a loading bay door to find Jesse outside, and a panicky Lydia interrogates about Mike’s last name before she’ll let him into the warehouse. She takes him inside, where he uses a forklift to grab a barrel of methylamine that Lydia has erased from inventory off the shelf. As Jesse lowers the barrel, Lydia yells for him to stop. "Please tell me that's not what I think it is," she says, pointing her flashlight at a GPS tracker affixed to the bottom of the barrel . 5x4_Fifty-One_promo_07.jpeg|Jesse meeting Lydia in the warehouse . 5x4 Lydia and Jesse higher quality.png|Lydia and Jesse look at the GPS tracker on the methylamine barrel . The next day, back in Albuquerque at the Vamonos Pest headquarters, Jesse and Mike discuss the GPS device while Walt listens silently. Suspicious of the GPS's sloppy installation, and that the device was attached to the only barrel Lydia allowed Jesse to touch, Mike learns that Lydia was the one who spotted it and concludes she planted it to extricate herself from the business. Mike vows to kill her, even if it means slowing down business for a while. Jesse turns to Walt for a vote to spare Lydia's life. Walt doesn't care about Lydia, but the supply problem does bother him: "Nothing stops this train," Walt finally says. It's clear that this is the end of the discussion, and Lydia has earned (yet another) stay of execution. Mike, Walt, and Jesse soon kidnap Lydia and bring her to an abandoned warehouse, where they handcuff her to a table. At Mike's orders, she calls Hank to report that she spotted what looked like a GPS device on one of Madrigal's methylamine barrels, and to ask how she should handle that development. On a laptop, Jesse taps into the bug Walt planted in Hank's office, and they all listen as Hank and Gomez puzzle over who planted the GPS device - supporting Mike's belief that it was Lydia who did . As Lydia protests her innocence, the group listens as Hank calls the Houston DEA office and learns that his colleagues in Texas did indeed tag the methylamine barrels - not just the one that Lydia spotted, but all of them. Still, Mike maintains they should kill Lydia. "She's a loose cannon," he says. "The woman put a hit out on me." Besides, her barrels of methylamine are now all useless to them. Desperate, Lydia blurts out that she can direct them to "an ocean" of methylamine . Walt talks one-on-one with Lydia, who demands a guarantee that she won't be killed once she reveals the methylamine source. When Walt asks why she went after Mike, she says she couldn't abide his decision to pay off - rather than kill - his nine men in prison, a complaint Walt definitely shares. She asks him to swear on his children's lives that she won't be harmed, then reveals how Walt can obtain 24,000 gallons of methylamine . Once Walt brings Mike and Jesse back into the warehouse, Lydia lays down a map revealing the route for a train carrying a tanker car full of methylamine. She zeroes in on a three-mile stretch of "dark territory" - a dead zone for all lines of communication - and suggests they rob the train there. Mike points out that in order to get away with the robbery, they'll have to kill the innocent train crew, which deeply troubles Jesse. Stymied, the guys head back to Albuquerque. With Lydia's help, they identify the car carrying the methylamine by referring to the freight manifest that gets sent to Madrigal automatically once the train leaves the yard, and end up successfully pulling off the train heist, able to steal 1,000 gallons of mathylamine without killing or alerting the crew or anyone else. . Later, at a coffee shop, Walt asks Lydia for the names of Mike's men. Concerned that Walt will kill her once she gives up the list, Lydia argues for her continued usefulness by proposing he use Madrigal's resources to expand the business into the Czech Republic. Walt hears her out, and agrees to a trial run of her plan. Pleased, she shakes his hand and gives him the names. After she exits, Walt uncovers the ricin vial that he'd intended to poison her with: she'd been right about his intentions after all. As Walt and Todd cook batch after batch, Lydia becomes in charge of shipping the meth to the Czech Republic in oil drums using her Madrigal connections . Later, a distressed Lydia drives a rental car to the A1A Car Wash where Walt, after formally extricating himself from the meth business, now devotes his energies to managing alongside Skyler. At the cash register, Lydia complains to Walt that the purity of her product is down below 70 percent, begging him to come back and right the ship. However, Walt tells her that her problems are none of his concern, and, despite her protests, merely replies "Please give this to your carwash professional, and have an A-1 day.” As Lydia leaves, Skyler remarks at the oddity of someone driving a rental car through a car wash. After Skyler presses him, Walt honestly replies that she was one of his former business associates. Skyler angrily approaches Lydia and tells her to leave the car wash at once. Startled, Lydia departs . Characterizaton Lydia is a very high-strung and nervous character, and displays these characteristics even more so when she is under stress. She breathes quite fast and lightly from her upper-chest, rather than taking deep breaths from her diaphragm. Lydia may have abetted Gus' criminal activities, but it is clear that she is much more concerned about the blowback from Gus' death landing on her. This fear causes her to go to lengths to make an 11-person kill list of everyone who might tie her to the superlab and Gus's drug empire and asks Mike to take care of them all. Right before Hank and the other agents show up at the Houston office, Lydia realizes that she has put on two different shoes, and after the DEA leaves she screams into a throw pillow. It is revealed that Hank did not miss that clue to Lydia's possible involvement as a link between "Burgermeister Meisterburger" in the German home office of Madrigal and Ron in the warehouse. Lydia is also prone to exaggeration, telling Mike that 14 DEA agents were screaming and yelling at her, and swarming all over the warehouse. Despite her uptightness and energy, she can be cunning and quite ruthless when it comes to eliminating (such as Chow) or ratting out (such as Ron) other members of the organization to save herself. She is cold and calculating, and seems very much in control of her destiny: she chooses time and again to pursue the lucrative meth business, completely insensitive to the human cost. She gets lucky, though, when implacable, unstoppable Mike chooses to let her live instead of leaving her dead in a ditch somewhere. Now bartering methylamine for her life, Lydia gets lucky once again when she and Jesse discover DEA trackers attached to the barrels of methylamine they're about to steal, saving them all from prison. However, since that means she's no longer useful to the meth operation, her life is forfeit unless she suggests a grand theft from a train to fulfill all their precursor needs. Even when she is terrified and backed into a corner, Lydia has the audacity to ask for a cut of the money from the train heist. She appears to be quite fluent in German, which is presumably necessary for anyone working at a German corporation. Quotes Murders connected to Lydia *'Duane Chow': Shot by Chris Mara on orders from Lydia. ("Madrigal") es:Lydia Rodarte-Quayle Category:Breaking Bad characters Category:Walt's drug empire Category:Business people Category:Gus' drug empire